SPACEBEARS: Preorder StarDrive For Beta Access

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If you don’t watch the trailer for 4X Action-Strategy game StarDrive and immediately go 1) “HOLY BALLS SPACEBEARS” 2) “JINKIES! That captain-type man smoking a pipe looks jolly good wot wot” or 3) “I really want to make my own little ship to laser people with” then you are probably not me. But don’t worry! I hear that if you do like the look of this space shenanigan you can preorder it on Steam now and get immediate access to the Beta along with a 15% discount on it at the same time. I can bearly contain myself. Have a look:

Time was when one wanted a – bear with me – real time strategic modular ship-building game, you would have to go with the real-time and not the modular ship-building, but now you can have both at once thrown in with SpaceOwls and Space….Wolves? According to Stardrive you can even go to galactic battle with a… lettuce? Some sort of Cabbage Man?

Direct arcade control of ships and custom fleet formations in battle, and the ability to incite rebellions and spy on your fellow Captain Birdseye with your Squidmonster race seem like other things that influence the Goings On. You can build your own flagship…ship… to get you invested in a fleet and the whole thing looks like a laser-toting frenzy when a battle is happening. According to the Steam info you can even beam down some ground troops for extended tactical tentacles.

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Yup, bought it yesterday afternoon and have spent 15 hours since then playing. At two o’clock this morning I kept on saying to myself “I’ll just wait ten more minutes so my Dreadnaught can finish production and I can free those poor enslaved Owlooks. And then enslave them all again!” Which is very much this games equivalent to “one turn more” syndrome.

The game is fantastic as is, and goodness knows what will be achieved once the stability issues are smoothed over (it lags a bit on huge maps, though largely towards the end of a game when there are thousands – maybe tens of thousands – of ships flying about. But even that isn’t very bad) and things like the tech tree and events system gets fleshed out a bit.

But for a one man, one artist, team what’s been produced is utterly fantastic.

Gal Civ 2 most definitely was not real time, and absolutely did not have direct “arcade control” of the tactical battles. I’ve no idea if this stuff actually works well, mind you, but it’s a very different design than any current 4X game of which I’m aware.

This game looks proper brilliant, if you pardon my American butchering of the British vernacular. There’s just something so extremely clean about its screenshots that I feel the people working on it really know what they’re doing, and the whole thing is going to come together with the craftsmanship of a Swiss watch maker’s masterpiece.

That said, there’s a missing piece of the puzzle that bothers me. The combat looks like it’s a real time actiony affair. But the game is a 4X game – something that makes me a bit apprehensive after SOTS2, truth be told. So how does 4X game and real time action game fit together? Not the same way as SOTS1, from the looks of it.

Can you control a single ship and fly around (like Starsector, formerly Starfarer, a game whose combat looks a lot like Stardrive’s trailer)? I kind of hope that’s the case. Or do you just give the orders and have the ships do their things in a fairly typical RTS fashion? Does combat and the 4X game proper take place in the same game mode, like Sins of a Solar Empire?

Edit: I see the RPS article actually mentions, “Direct arcade control of ships,” so looks like I picked up the vibe correctly from the trailer. But I’m still confused as to how the rest of it fits together.

I was sceptical at first, because I also like my 4x games to be more relaxing, turn based affairs. After playing the beta for some hours, though, all my doubts are gone. You can adjust the speed of the game and pause it at any moment with the spacebar, and after some time it feels so completly natural that you ask yourself if going completely turn based would have any benefits at all.

So my recommendation, if you are on the fence because of the real-time aspect but generally enjoy (space) 4x games: get in on the beta and play a great game! It is much slower than Sins of a Solar Empire for example (a game I really wanted to like but never quite could), and the RTS elements take a backseat, with the management of your empire in focus.

Edit: I just noticed that I forgot to answer your question, stupid me. You can take direct control of ships, but this feels more like a gimmick to me, because you will control pretty large fleets pretty fast, and direct movement feels more like a hindrance. It’s basically standard RTS controls all the way.

I’ve used the direct control mechanic to great effect in large fleet battles, actually. Your fleet’s AI has a tendency to hit and run, and take as little damage as possible, even if no one’s targeting them at the moment. I try to take control of a short range, hard-hitting ship that’s not getting focused, and get in a good position to focus-fire down an important enemy target. That’s how I finally beat the corsair ship that was lancing the fuck out of everything I sent at him.

I made a prototype of something like this once. It was basically Gratuitous Space Battles (build fleet, and basic strategy) with drop-in drop-out control of any ship on the field. It was a good bit of proper fun, too. Nothing like wasting a dozen bombers in a row because you got between two capital ships having a down-and-dirty slugfest with Freespace-style beam weapons, then hopping straight into one of those capital ships to take revenge.

So I guess what I’m saying is, I have high hopes for this. Here’s hoping it lets its arcade side shine through once in a while.

The 4X element is what makes the difference here, just fleet vs fleet battles with direct control in the mix can be found in Starsector (formerly Starfarer, probably because Starfarer is hard to trademark) and SPAZ.

Mascot!? You had best hope that when the day of reckoning comes Horace will take pity on you and merely crush you swiftly in his devouring jaws for your impertinece, rather than swallowing you whole and condemning you to an eternity floating down his lower intestine!

I hope so.
It is up to the dev to decide what is best for his game, but considering the sales of some indie studios on macosx & linux, I think it is a mistake to build a game only for windows..
Space bears and a very polished trailer are enough to make me want to support the dev & preorder his game, but I try to focus on supporting multi OSes games : these games will remain playable without having to mount a virtual machine or other magickery in the years to come. I don’t use my windows partition for anything else (doc editing, web, dev, multimedia) than for the games that are only on that platform.
No space bear preorder for me then… if the game is very good, I will buy it anyway after its launch.

I don’t pretend to understand the needs of indie devs, nor do I dare imagine I could do better than them, but I feel like I’ve seen enough to say this: indie devs, please avoid all Microsoft middleware that isn’t called DirectX.

They seem to have drawn a lot of inspiration from Distant Worlds. Not a bad thing if they do it right, especially if they managed to put a good galaxy economy system in place. I also like the changes it adds to the genre, like controlling your ships and the federation thing (although something similar existed in Seven Kingdom 2: The Fryhtan Wars. Every game should look on that game for diplomacy and espionage depth).

Anyone knows if a non steam version is also coming out?

EDIT:
Also, do they have planet destroyers? Every space game needs that.

It looks superficially like Distant Worlds and you can automate a certain amount of things but Distant Worlds has a considerably steeper learning curve. I really didn’t enjoy Distant Worlds much – particularly as it cost me the guts of a hundred quid to buy it and the two expansions. It just never clicked with me.

OK when comparing with DW, yes it has a lot of similarities, 4X and real time but the differences are where it counts,

Not 2D visuals but 2.75D (sounds dumb but looks great)
Not an overly complicated economy
Not too much automation, just enough for those who want it.
Doesn’t take itself too seriously
Really Really good ship design
And lots of fun combat

I actually love DW economy and migration system. I love to do what I want with other races, even if I usually merge them in the empire. Being “bad” should give more benefits.
And no, DW economy system is easy as fuck. You swim in dosh in no time. I hope they correct that in Shadows.
And I never played the game, but according tolink to spacesector.com
it draws a lot of inspiration from DW. That is not a bad thing, and I like the way they are doing ships. I’d love to have a fusion of these two games, all features together to create the most awesome space game out there. And with GalCiv 2 AI too, of course.

You can directly control one ship with WASD controls or RTS style controls for many ships. For me the flagship control is a bit of a gimmick. No harm it being there but I never used it.

Despite being real time pausible it reminds me most of Star Empires 4 as far as the diplomacy and ship design go. The combat just looks great and appears to be fully modelled, so you can protect critical components with armor, power supplies have a limited range to to power all components you either use liberal amounts of nuclear reactors or run power conduits through the ship (little tip here – try to run these power conduits under the consoles where you seat the crew so the explosions will let them know if a fuse needs changing) and many of your weapons will have an arc of attack.

The diplomacy is weak and there’s a fairly limited selection of race types, though they cover all the usual suspects. In two games the other races universally ended up quite angry at me no matter how I treated them.

I’m loving the combat and the ship design. The main star map interface is great. It’d be nice if escape wasn’t your primary way of getting off a screen, ie if I’m in the research screen I don’t want to escape and then select my empire screen, I want to just hit the empire screen button and go there.

I haven’t played much Endless Space since Beta so I have to go back and try that again, particularly with the free DLC but I think I prefer Stardrive so far.

“Know then that it is the year 10191. In this time, the most precious substance in the universe is the Honey. The honey extends life. The honey expands consciousness. The honey is vital to space travel.”